


Thou Art My Shield (the Rome in a Day Re-remix)

by Teyke



Series: Camelot? Camelot! [3]
Category: Avengers (Comics), Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Alternate Reality, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Camelot!, M/M, Pining, Remix, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-03
Updated: 2016-06-03
Packaged: 2018-07-11 22:04:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7072309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teyke/pseuds/Teyke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or, 'Five Lesser-Known Inventions of King Anthony the Builder'.</p><p>In which Tony misses home, the Avengers, and Steve. Like, a lot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thou Art My Shield (the Rome in a Day Re-remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sineala](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sineala/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Hour of Greatest Need (The Left to His Own Devices Remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5989789) by [Sineala](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sineala/pseuds/Sineala). 



> I told Sineala I'd write her a cracky remix of her angsty remix of my fic which is an AU of a What-if of Doomquest. I kinda failed at the crack, but here, have some more angst?
> 
> In Sine's fic Tony's shield got painted for him 'in short order'; this fic posits that it's only short compared to how long he wound up being stuck in Camelot. Dialogue in the first section is direct from her fic. Er, which you should read before this one, or this one won't make too much sense. 
> 
> Thank you to Arctua for betaing! Any mistakes that remain are all my own.

1\. Modern Heraldry

Inspiration was sometimes like a light-bulb going off. Other times it was like a punch to the gut.

“A shield,” said Tony. He could see it, the steps to take, the contingencies to prepare in case Plan A didn't work (because Plan A never did), and most clearly of all: at the end of it, being reunited with his friends. _Steve_. He knew _exactly_ what his shield would be. “Paly argent and gules, a chief azure, upon the chief three mullets argent.”

His King of Arms, Geoffrey, blinked. Then he said, “Very good, Your Majesty.”

 

* * *

 

2\. IFC Drawings

A week later, Geoffrey presented his king with his brand-new shield in the main audience hall, displaying for all to see the single red and white stripe on a blue background, with three silver hammers decorating the blue sections.

Tony stared at it, trying to puzzle out how Geoffrey had managed to pull _that_ from a description of Captain America's shield. It took a while. It took even longer to fight down the urge to facepalm when he got it. Then, trying very hard to not embarrass the old man in front of the entire court, Tony beckoned him forward and quietly told him, “ _Mullets_ , not mallets. The chief is on the _top_. And pal _y_ , not _pale_. Paly as in pallets.” He made sure to enunciate this time.

“Sire.” Geoffrey looked nearly affronted. “Will that not be rather, er, busy?”

Nobody had ever accused Steve's shield of subtlety. “I'm a busy fellow. I—yes, what is it?” This last was directed at the page boy who had just scrambled into the room.

“Sire! Word's come up, the roof on the new mill fell in!”

His new paper mill. Oh, Lord. “Is anyone injured?” Tony demanded, rising from his throne. Bedivere, bless his soul, took over immediately, dismissing the court.

“No, Sire, but it's an awful mess!”

Relief. Then disappointment, because this would cause delays, and God, he was tired of living in a place without modern health care. The improvements he'd implemented already had made enormous differences, but that was only because they were starting from the bottom of a very slimy barrel. _Sanitation_ , ugh. The new nursing order he'd founded, the Order of Saint Sarah, was making slow headway even in convincing people that they should _wash their hands. With soap._

He shoved irritation aside in favour of focusing on damage control. He did that a lot these days. “Alright. Fetch my horse.”

***

“You had inadequate support here, and here.” Tony indicated the stress points along what remained of the main roof beam. Mary, the head miller, nodded dubiously, and he bit back a sigh. He needed to be going over this in depth with _architects_ , but here and now, the people who built water mills were also the people who ran them. “I don't suppose you have any drawings of the place?”

“The sheriff has one, Sire. A landscape of the mill house against the river.”

“Not _artistic_ drawings. Plans for how the place was built. A layout, if nothing else.”

“We built it the same as the mill down in Landscroft,” said Mary, clearly confused. “Only larger, of course, Your Majesty.”

Tony rubbed at his temples. He shouldn't be surprised. It wasn't just knowledge of beams and trusses, stress and strain, or a theory of gravity that was missing from this time. It was science itself, a whole systematic approach to problem solving, to figuring out the world and interacting with it. It wasn't that his people—he couldn't quite think of them as 'subjects' without cringing—were stupid. But a lack of framework combined with a well-get-on-with-it attitude left them... building three-story buildings without any designs, let alone calculations.

He should have anticipated this. He should have been involved from the beginning—but all his effort had been going into metallurgy, into making sure the _saws_ would be alright. They _had_ mills already; he'd thought they could handle this!

Of course, that was the entire problem when you didn't have a systematic approach. One success, ten successes, didn't guarantee an eleventh. They were all lucky that the workers had heard the beam cracking in time to get the hell out, or his oversight would have been responsible for a tragedy instead of just a setback to his paper-making program.

“Alright,” said Tony, picking his way out from the wreckage. Mary followed behind him, holding her skirts up so she didn't get tangled in it. “I can have this re-designed in a day, and we'll start over.” It would only take him that long because he'd have to make sure he wasn't depending on any techniques too far outside local experience. “This time you'll have a plan to follow, and there's not going to be any under-supported beams.” Then a horrible thought occurred to him. “Can you read?”

Mary shook her head mutely.

Of-freaking-course. Public education programs weren't far enough along, yet _, either._

Mary looked like a kicked puppy. Tony made himself square his shoulders and give the miller an encouraging smile. “Well, we can get around that. I'll send you a scribe—one of the squires. He'll probably be able to teach you, too.”

He was going to educate his people, even if he had to stand in front of the classroom himself, and build paper mills, even if he had to hold the hammer himself, and get his name in the history books, even if he had to print the first copies himself.

His team _would_ know to come for him.

***

That night, when he returned to the castle, he wearily asked Bedivere, “Tell Geoffrey to submit a sketch of the shield first, please, before he crafts it this time. Let's not have repeat of this morning.”

 

* * *

 

3\. The SPCA

Geoffrey delivered the sketch of the shield two weeks later, when Tony was going over tax reforms with Bedivere. It was laid out on a sheet of fine, supple vellum, the kind that Tony hoped to soon send the way of the dodo via his paper mills, if he could ever get one built. Although the design was done primarily in black ink, Geoffrey hadn't been able to restrain himself entirely, and the ink was augmented by a great deal of silver thread.

“Er,” said Tony, staring at it.

“The pallets, which shall be rendered in argent and gules,” said Geoffrey, tracing out the Escher-like patterns that adorned the top and bottom of the shield, and which were certainly not anything linear enough to be stripes. In fact, it took some squinting to figure out what the lumpy, repeating pattern was—

 _Pallets_ , Tony realized, his eyes adjusting to suddenly pick out the shapes of planks. Geoffrey had made the background a pattern of interlocking red and silver _wooden pallets_. Exactly like the kind Tony had sketched out for his brand-new engineering students last week for use in storage and transporting things by two-wheeled cart.

“Er,” Tony said again.

“The chief, as you say, on top of them,” said Geoffrey, pointing to the horizontal stripe in the centre which had _ASUR_ picked out across it in Geoffrey's crabbed handwriting. “And the three silver mullets upon it.”

“Mullets,” repeated Tony.

“Yes,” said Geoffrey, pulling himself up proudly. “I apologize for the delay, sire. I wished to be sure that my depiction was anatomically correct, and it took some time to confirm the correct species with various fishermen.”

Tony stared at the three fish staring up at him from the 'sketch' of the shield. There was so much silver thread involved that the fish were rendered into 3D, from their fishy fins to their bulging silver eyes.

“Thanks, Geoffrey,” he said eventually, because he was the king and everybody waited on his word these days. “I'll... let you know.”

Bedivere saw Geoffrey out the door and then returned, waiting by as Tony sat slumped in his chair. Eventually, though, the pointed look of his would-be Lord Chancellor—who wouldn't have been 'would-be' if the title had existed in this time—drew Tony out of his thoughts.

“It is not what you were expecting, sire?”

“And you _were_ expecting it?” Tony asked, gesturing at the fish. They really were quite ridiculously lifelike. When he got back home he was going to have to make a replica of Geoffrey's design and present it to Steve, just to see his _face_.

“Pallets and mullets were what you asked for.”

Tony blinked at him. Sure, Bedivere wasn't King of Arms, but he had his own shield with a device upon it—a 'gryffyn rampant'—so he should have had _some_ inkling of heraldic terms... realization began to dawn. “Oh, Lord. I can't remember when modern heraldry was invented.”

Bedivere raised an eyebrow. “Geoffrey tells me, sire, that most lords nowadays just go for a great bloody monster in the middle of their shields.”

“Lord. No wonder it looks like something designed to give the SPCA fits.”

“The SPCA?”

“Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, not that there's a chapter here. I'm pretty sure you guys are still at the 'tossing sacks of unwanted kittens into rivers' stage,” Tony muttered. He winced as soon as it left his mouth, and looked up to apologize. Bedivere didn't deserve his sarcasm, nor his bitterness.

Bedivere was looking at him with a barely-concealed air of confused suspicion, clearly detecting the sarcasm but not knowing what it was about. Because he didn't realize what was wrong with tossing sacks of unwanted kittens into rivers.

“Oh my _god_ ,” said Tony, sitting up in horror. “People here murder kittens!”

 

* * *

 

4\. The Puddling Furnace

“Tony!” Steve cried. The brass of his vest buttons gleamed brightly in the sun, but the smile on his face eclipsed even that celestial body. “We've found you at last!”

He sprang down from his brontosaurus and doffed his sailor's cap, tucking it under his bare, muscled arm as he knelt before Tony and took his hand. “Shellhead,” he said, earnestly gazing up at Tony with eyes so blue Tony could drown in them. “Will you do me the honour of riding my dinosaur?”

“Watch out for the tail!” yelled Wasp, as the two-ton appendage lazily whipped to the side and crashed through the line of forge-houses that Tony had spent the last five years carefully upgrading. Metal clanged against stone—

Tony woke up and found himself in darkness. Somewhere out in front of him something _had_ crashed down: he could hear metal clinking against stone as it wobbled its way into stillness. Given the direction and the noise, it was probably Steve's shield. The one that everyone in this time called _his_ shield, even though for the past five years all it had done was be displayed at court during the day and sit on his bedroom wall at night.

He shoved his way out of his four-poster bed, which took some doing, just as Oliver poked his head in through the door connecting to the chamberlain's quarters. “Sire?”

“Nothing, never mind,” Tony said, waving him off. It had been enough work to get Oliver to sleep in a separate room of his own, rather than at Tony's hearth, and he didn't want Oliver going back to annoying habits. The problem with being king was that everyone wanted to _wait_ on him, even in the long dark hours of the night when Tony would rather have been alone, if he couldn't have the people—person—whose presence he missed the most.

Dark was right. Tony stubbed his toes twice on the uneven floor, and again on the rug, before he got to the fireplace. He fumbled around for the poker only for Oliver to silently hand it to him. Suppressing a sigh, Tony poked the coals into something that produced a workable amount of light.

“Shall I light the candles, sire?” Oliver asked, keeping his voice low but already reaching for a taper.

“No, never mind,” said Tony, trying not to be irritable about it. He went over to examine the shield instead. The bottom was sadly dented; there was no way he could put it right without needing to redo the design that Geoffrey had worked so long to get right. When he ran his hand along the wall he nearly cut himself on the sharp edge of iron there, the broken remnants of the hook upon which his shield was supposed to be hanging. It had broken off, brittle and aged after only five years; he could feel the warp in the metal. Installation of a new hook would have to wait until daylight. He hadn't yet installed electrical wiring installed in his bedroom, considering it less important than all his workshops, and the classrooms, and the new hospital...

And if this was any indication, then he needed to concentrate more on steel production. He'd been devoting too much effort to copper and the iron cores he needed for his generators. Not that Camelot's steelworks hadn't improved greatly in the five years since he'd had that hook installed in his wall, but 'great improvement' didn't equal 'good enough'. His generators were important, but that included their enclosures, too.

He'd look into it in the morning. In the morning. It was summer; morning would come soon enough. Tony turned around and shuffled back to bed.

“Sire?” Oliver asked, his voice as soft as always.

“Go back to bed,” Tony told him, laying the shield on one side of his own too large, too lonely bed and climbing in on the other. He stared up at the ceiling above him as Oliver, typically, ignored his orders long enough to bank the fire down again, plunging the room into near-darkness, before finding his way back to his own door. The ceiling stared back, long after Oliver had left.

Tony turned over and hugged the shield to himself, feeling the cold metal of the design press patterns into his skin. It was awkward and ungainly, and it wasn't at all like curling up against—his dream hadn't been real. Even if—even _when_ Steve came back for him, even _when_ the Avengers saved him, Steve wasn't going to go down on one knee before him, he wasn't going to hold him in bed, and he _certainly_ wasn't going to ask him to 'ride his dinosaur'. They weren't like that, Steve had never been like that, and Tony had contented himself simply being Steve's friend.

But right now this stupid shield was all of Tony's hopes, all his programs and initiatives and every effort he was making to get his name in history, all his efforts to get _back_ to his friend. All that, and it was dented and broken, out of shape.

Were the years he spent in this time doing the same thing to him? He'd spent five years reinventing the wheel, and doing nearly no new work at all.

He should just reforge the shield himself. Hell, if he spent the next six months seriously focusing on his steelworks, he might be able to get it up to the point where he could produce plates of the quality required to replace the seriously-in-need-of-workshop-time ones that were starting to fall off his armour. Six months. It was a ludicrous amount of time—but it took that long, building the damn facilities, making sure that his smiths understood what was going on, training them to know by feel the differences in the metal, training them to not make stupid mistakes that slowed down production and time, and then doing it all over again when the slightly-higher-quality work could be used in new facilities for the _next_ related process. He couldn't cut that out, not when he was literally building everything from scratch. Nor could he cut any of the hundred and fifty other projects on the go, all _also_ working nearly from scratch, and all of them interrelated.

Six months. Maybe a year.

It had been five years already, one more wasn't bad.

Tony curled his arms tighter about the shield. He hadn't expected to be here so long. If he had, he'd have devoted more to the steelmaking from the start: if he had materials strong enough to replace plates on the armour, then he could just bury a time capsule and have done with.

He'd still need somebody to know to dig it up, though. Maybe a series of time capsules...

***

When the maids came in with his breakfast in the morning, they found their king still fast asleep, curled protectively around his shield.

Gossip flew, as it did in a castle. But the courtiers were by now used to their eccentric king, and this was fairly mild.

 

* * *

 

5\. Time Capsules

There were two designs gracing the lid of the box, etched in with diamond-tipped files. The first marked it as royal property: his shield, rendered without colour, the stripes and stars recognizable enough on their own. The second was the design for the addressee: three concentric circles with a single star in the centre.

Tony ran his fingers over the familiar grooves. For the past two and a half years he'd kept this box by his bedside, or in his workroom, and he'd developed the habit of tracing out the patterns with his fingertips when there was no one else around to see him. It had taken him nearly six months after Steve had left to get his materials manufacturing up to the point where he was happy enough to build himself a time capsule that would last millennia and preserve the contents inside. Every letter he'd written that he couldn't send, every sketch about something that nobody but Steve would understand, he'd stuck in this box, squirrelling it away against the day that Steve came back, but keeping it a time capsule as insurance against his own hopes.

After the first year, those hopes slowly faded, as Tony realized that if Steve _had_ come back, then he'd split the timeline in doing so—and Tony's wasn't the one where Steve showed up. It turned into a time capsule in truth, then, as Tony added letters warning Steve not to come back—and maybe that was why he hadn't.

Or maybe the time capsule had just never been found. Tony hadn't discussed it with Steve before he'd left, after all. And they had no special places to them alone that wouldn't be changed and overrun by the far-reaching hand of Time. To do this he'd just have to bury it deep and hope the timing worked out.

Tony's fingers traced the top again, and then the welds at the side, which he'd made only last night, sealing it firmly closed.

“Sire?” Bedivere prompted. “You wished for it to be buried today?”

There was understanding in his eyes. Bedivere knew what Steve meant to him—even if he disapproved, after the way Steve had vanished. Bedivere could understand why he needed to do this now, before the nuptials due to take place in three days. He could probably even understand why the thought of those nuptials brought Tony no joy.

“No,” said Tony abruptly. His fingers closed around the sharp edges of the box. “Change of plans. I'll be down in the smelting plant until supper.”

He stood and picked up the box with a grunt—material made to withstand millennia had a certain heft to it—and made his way out to the furnaces alone. Although his time was in much demand these days, no one approached him along the way. His subjects saw his expression and got out of his way with the promptness due a king's rank, and for once, Tony could only feel grateful for that.

Steve would have remembered that the right of kings was not divine, but Steve was not coming back.

Tony was getting married in three days, and not to Steve. This marriage was entirely political, one more step along his road to the foundation of Steve's grand Commonwealth. That was the future Tony was supposed to bring about, so that Steve could be born into a world united, where peace reigned, and illness and poverty were things of the past. It was a future that Tony could be proud of, _should_ be proud to bring about.

In the end he skipped supper, and spent the evening staring into a molten crucible, watching his time capsule glow cherry-red, then white, and finally begin to slag. The letters inside burned without ever being read again, and that was as it should be.

Steve was not coming back, and Tony had to let him go.

 

**Author's Note:**

> The final version of King Anthony's shield is the one that Sine picked, the triangle one (the on the right [here](http://somnolentbear.tumblr.com/post/139164904499)). 
> 
> As Sine noted in her end-notes, King Arthur lived long before the Age of Heraldry, but that didn't stop medieval heraldry buffs from just making up devices for him (and others to whom they gave 'attributed arms').


End file.
